A DAOIST PERSPECTIVE ON GEORGE OPPEN’S POETRY AND POETICS by XIAOSHENG YANG HANK LAZER, COMMITTEE CHAIR PHILIP BEIDLER HEATHER WHITE EMILY WITTMAN THOMAS FOX A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2016 Copyright Xiaosheng Yang 2016 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT I use Daoist principles of ontological simplicity and the unmediated relationship between man and the ten thousand things to analyze George Oppen’s poems and poetics. First, I conduct a survey of the current state of American poetry studies and Oppen studies in China. Second, I examine Oppen’s poetics of “a language of silence.” Third, I seek the compatibility between the two Daoist principles and Oppen’s poetic philosophy of silence and clarity. Fourth, I interpret Oppen’s representative poems, particularly his only long poem, “Of Being Numerous” through a Daoist perspective. Finally, I analyze two Chinese scholars’ translations of the first section of “Route,” and I also give an account on how I translate “Of Being Numerous” into Chinese. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank my supervisor, Hank Lazer, who has taken the time and effort to be an instrumental part of this process. Without his extensive support and continuous encouragement, this dissertation would not have been possible. My sincere thanks also go out to Philip Beidler for his unconditional help in my academic progress. I am indebted to Thomas Fox. He allowed me to teach as a graduate teaching assistant at the Department of Modern Languages and Classics so that I could have the funds to carry out this research. My gratitude comes to Heather White. She heard and helped me through the first of the many difficulties that underpin a doctoral student’s academic life. I would also thank Emily Wittman for her always cheering me up and helping me along with my thinking. My special thanks belong to my parents who have always been supportive of me, and to my wife and son whose love and support make me capable of this accomplishment. Lest I forget, I am also grateful to the many faculty members, colleagues, and friends from the English Department and the Department of Modern Languages and Classics. They have kept assisting me and giving me strength, inspiration, and joy in what I do. iii CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iii 1. THE CURRENT STATE OF MODERN AMERICAN POETRY STUDIES IN CHINA ........ 1 2. GEORGE OPPEN’S POETICS ................................................................................................ 13 3. A COMPARISON BETWEEN GEORGE OPPEN’S POETICS AND DAOIST PRINCIPLES ....................................................................................................................................................... 29 4. A DAOIST PERSPECTIVE ON GEORGE OPPEN’S WORKS ............................................ 50 4.1 A Daoist Perspective on George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” ...................................... 50 4.2 A Daoist Perspective on George Oppen’s Other Representative Poems .......................... 111 5. THE TRANSLATION OF GEORGE OPPEN INTO CHINESE .......................................... 129 5.1 An Analysis of Two Chinese Translations of the First Section of “Route” ...................... 129 5.2 My Translation of “Of Being Numerous” into Chinese .................................................... 143 NOTES ........................................................................................................................................ 155 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 176 APPENDIX ................................................................................................................................. 181 iv 1. THE CURRENT STATE OF MODERN AMERICAN POETRY STUDIES IN CHINA American literature studies have long been an academic discipline in China although colleges and other educational institutes where the bulk of American literature studies are undertaken focused mainly on the historical aspect of literature. The favoritism to literary history and literary movements over individual writers and their works would have provided a quick overview of what has happened in American letters from Puritanism of the 17th century to present day postmodernism. Chinese scholars of American literature apparently did not hesitate to draw on the experience of their western counterparts, though as for which historical periods merit more attention and how to corral writers into different schools of thoughts, they had their own observations and reservations. The effort to assert the historicity of literature and literary figures would soon see its goals achieved: American literature in the order of their occurrence became familiar to Chinese intellectuals who between 1949 and 1979 only had limited access to western literary texts, and American literature presently became a popular course for an ever growing body of college students of foreign literature. But such an approach, with all of its educational justifications, has its limits. The historical representation which aims at providing a wide range of writers and exhibiting the progress of American literature first and foremost is arbitrary and biased. According to Alan Golding, author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry, not only historicizing and moralizing approaches in the formation of a poetry anthology but also such criteria as universal excellence and revisionism by which poets are canonized, succumb to partiality. Golding argues that either editors, poets, and college professors canonizing poets, or poetry magazines, 1 college press and other educational institutions publishing poetic canons, they do so within a social and political mechanism that aims to shape the social subjects and make possible and available only a certain range of social positions and attitudes. In other words, the formation/interpretation of an anthology, as long as it remains a historical process, will always be incomplete, and liable to change. Ziqing Zhang, the editor of the voluminous A History of 20th Century American Poetry, for instance, claims that Oppen is a comparatively minor poet in the group of the Objectivists, and in his book, he gives little attention to Oppen’s writings.1 In contrast, when asked whose poems are worthy of introduction to Chinese readers by a prestigious press in China which plans to restart its influential series on translations of international poetry, Yunte Huang, a comparative literature scholar and editorial board member of that press, affirms that “he [Oppen] is one of the few I shall recommend to them.”2 By citing these two well- known Chinese scholars’ disparate opinions on such an American poet as Geroge Oppen, I do not propose that Oppen is a controversial figure in terms of his intellectual heft and historical significance in the development of modern American poetry, rather, I intend to highlight that the mapping out of American poetry (particularly historically) is impossible to be unbiased, and is certain to leave some poets over/under-represented. Meanwhile, precisely because of its arbitrariness and prejudice, the angle of historicism, paradoxically, increases the potential for critics to reclaim and redeem those historically less prominent yet otherwise critical poets. I would argue that Oppen and other Objectivist poets are those whose works are underappreciated and that their works now merit a long overdue attention and recognition among Chinese readers. The asymmetry between China and America in the publication and reception of post- modernist American poets is striking though the research on their works has substantially increased in the last decade in China. For instance, the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics 2 (CAAP) was founded in China in 2008 with Marjorie Perloff being the president and Charles Bernstein, the vice president, both of whom have been known for their affinity for experimental and avant-gardist poetry. The CAAP’s latest annual conference on November 28, 2015, attracted over 140 poets, poetry scholars, and literary magazine editors from in and outside China. A survey of the anthologies of modern and contemporary American poetry that did get published in China over the past three decades would help explain why some of the American poets are popular with Chinese readers and others are not. The anthologies and literary criticism under examination are all written or edited by the Chinese. For the sake of “authenticity,” I have excluded those translated anthologies because though the publishers are able to make manifest their intention and interest by publishing such anthologies, they nevertheless utilize their western counterparts’ perspectives to express their or their readers’ sentiments. One of the first books I have examined is American Poetry of the Twentieth Century published in 1995 by Henan University Press, in which Yu Peng, the author has surveyed forty-six poets spanning from Ezra Pound in the 1920s to Robert Bly in the late 1960s. In order to “give the readers some clear clues to these poets” (the author’s words),